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5 March 2009Starting from this issue, coming out MonthlyCoastline Newsletter : 5 March 2009CHRISTMAS PARADE We decorated Debbie Warrander’s Morris Oxford in an array of ‘Organic Fruit and veges ( well actually their plastic replicas!) and joined the line up at Riverton’s traditional Christmas Eve parade event. Our very first entry nearly 20 years ago was a huge crepe paper organic carrot with a massive fennel tail. Robert Guyton stood proudly with the crowd waiting to see his 12 foot long masterpiece, on a trailer labelled clearly ‘Organically grown,’ pass by. Unfortunately the recycled binder twine that was tying the front of the carrot broke before it got to the parade - the carrot pointed skyward and the tail was left behind. The driver managed to tie it down slightly flatter than it should have been and he stuffed some grass in the back of it for a tail. The organically grown carrot looked very flaccid and lack lustre – it must have been a bit of a joke for the crowd. Undeterred, we have had some great floats since, a huge paper mache ‘drains are for rain’ fish, an 8 metre long whitebait and a herd of antique 28 inch bicycles to name but a few. We welcome ideas and volunteers for future floats. ORGANIC FARM NZ - is an organic certification system for smaller growers and producers. This is a cheaper way to go when selling for the NZ Market only and is working successfully in other provinces. Andy Barrett from Otago OFNZ came down to Southland to speak to interested people last year. He will return and do a workshop on how to apply, using a sample property in autumn. Please email the Centre (office@sces.org.nz) if you would like to attend and spread the word to the small growers you know. Our workshop will be at a small farm and we will walk through an assessment for possible certification FLYING THE FLAG FOR OUR ESTUARY Together with the Art Department of Aparima College, the Riverton Estuary Care Society is commissioning a series of professionally produced banners that will profile and promote the values of the Jacob’s River Estuary. The banners will be designed by the pupils after a series of visits to the estuary and talks from members of the estuary care group, painted onto paper, then transferred to a tough, flag-grade synthetic material that is able to survive the weather experienced in our main street. The estuary group are providing the funding support needed by the Art Department and will get to keep the banners following their display along Palmerston Street, for other events. HERITAGE HARVEST FESTIVAL Harvest time is a busy time, but also a rewarding one. If you’ve done the work throughout the year and cared for your crops, there’ll be much to celebrate come autumn, and that’s just what we are doing in Riverton on March 28th and 29th in two of the town’s halls, Fleck’s and that of Riverton Primary School, displays, talks, work-shops, audiovisual presentations and interviews will all explore the harvest; vegetables from the garden, fruits from the orchard, wine and cider making, beekeeping, selecting, storing and saving seeds, preserving, drying, pickling the harvest, and a raft of interesting heritage activities. A barn-dance, featuring talented ‘Celtic heritage’ musicians from around the region will play at our Saturday night dance. People wanting to begin their own heritage orchard or garden in the coming season will enjoy browsing through the display of the varieties of heritage fruit and veges that grow well in Southland to help their selection. If you have unusual varieties named or un-named that we can display, please let us know. Both days have activities starting at 9-30am & finishing at 4-30pm. This is a joint project with our Open Orchard Project, Southland Seed Savers and Riverton Organic Group. ENVIRONMENT SOCIETY NEWS:COASTLINE NOW MONTHLY We decided at our last meeting to trial the Coastline monthly rather than quarterly to make producing it a less onerous task. Writing about what happens over three or four months is a huge task, so we are going to trail a ‘bite-sized’ version for a while. We welcome your feedback. As we have 250 on our mailing list you can choose one of the four options below. It will usually be like this one, 4 sides of A4 in future.
We really don’t mind which you prefer as long as you get to read it. We will continue to post it out each month unless we get an email from you. Or: Let us know if you are no longer interested in hearing from us so we can remove your from our mailing list – Thanks! www.sces.org.nz We are thrilled to see so many people are visiting our website regularly- they have saved it as a favourite and visit it each week and thereby don’t miss out on our weekly news and event updates, as those are put on as they happen and you can really feel like you are in touch. SUBS FOR 2009/10 Some of you may have noticed that we forgot to post the sub form out last year so a big thank you to those who subscribed in spite of that omission! So we have included the form now so you can confirm your interest and support for the Centre and its projects. Your subscription will cover you until June 2010 for membership, library use etc. OFFICE UPGRADE - We have upgraded in several ways to cut down our administration time and focus on our education activities and events.
OUR RIVERTON FARMERS MARKET might be small, but it’s good! It’s the only fully organic farmer’s market in the country (as the National Association have told us) so the goods are top quality as well. The farmers and growers who sell their produce there are amongst the nicest in the country! We’ve a new and spectacular sign that hangs like a medieval banner over the heads of the stall holders and makes a bright splash, even on a cloudy day. It maybe the biggest Farmer’s market banner in the country! Decide that for your self and make our Farmers market a regular stop for you on a Friday afternoon, by coming down for a look. The market starts at 3:00 and closes at 5:00. There are all sorts of delicious foods on offer and as a bonus, the Centre, with its organic food shop, is open at the same time, so you can pop in for a look around there as well. RIVERTON COMMUNITY ORCHARD At last, the garden is lush! After several years of fighting the dry, windblown soils of ‘the garden behind the Fire Station’ our work has paid off. The tree lupins we sowed have done their job, sheltering the growing fruit trees from the southerly winds, shading the sandy ground from the sun and bringing both nitrogen and carbon into the once-thin soils. Soil flora and fauna have exploded (in a good way) and everything else is flourishing, helped in part by the generous (and fresh) applications of duck and hen manure from the resident poultry. We’ve even managed to grow sweet corn this year - that’s how fertile the garden’s become. The apple rootstock is doing well, and the more mature trees have good crops of apples ready for picking. The row of Worcestershire berries along the east fence has grown impressively and is well-thorned-up in preparation to repel fence jumpers! All we need now is willing hands – keen gardeners to come and join the garden party! It’s fun there and there are interesting projects to get underway amongst the growing orchard trees. Contact Robert and we’ll make a time and get together for Stage 3 in the Orchard Garden! SCHOOL GARDEN Looking like a patchwork quilt, crops of all shades of green, short and tall, have spread across the sandy soil of the new shared-schools garden. Following the ploughing of the section, leased from the council for a peppercorn, seeds of lupin, buckwheat, vetch, oats, turnips, kale, red clover and rye have been sown in blocks to cover and condition the ground, in readiness for adoption by groups of children from the kindergarten, child care centre, primary and secondary school. Seed companies and local gardeners have kindly donated the seeds needed. Teachers and their families, along with school groups, have sown and watered the seeds in. Birds have done their best to thin out the crops, but the strategic use of netting has foiled them well enough. One attraction for observers of the transformation from the horse paddock to the school garden, has been the sight of two adult volunteers pushing a wheeled seed-sowing machine around and around in ever decreasing circles, sowing lupins. They’d heard the circus was in town, but this was an unexpected bonus! The growing of winter brassica crops in the classrooms begins soon. WELCOME TO THE FOOD FOREST It may not win an Oscar, but the locally filmed ‘Welcome to the Food Forest’ deserves your vote! Directed and filmed by budding film makers from Dunedin University, the DVD looks, in an amusing and interesting way, at the development of the Guyton’s permaculture food forest at Riverton. 12 hours of filming over 6 months of visits from the Dunedin crew were distilled down to just 8 and a half minutes of ‘how it was done’, with special interview material from one of the Guyton’s neighbours, providing an interesting commentary on how it all looked from the outside. The film premiered in Dunedin, to an audience of 50, then again (second premier?) at Riverton to 25 keen locals, including the ‘talent’. The reviews have all been good and I certainly recommend that you have a look at ‘Welcome to the Food Forest’. Much to my puzzlement, footage of me was ‘lost’ and I’m barely seen in the film, leaving the starring roles to Robyn and Adam. Perhaps that’s why it’s being so well received! Copies are available through the Centre for $7 with $2 from every CD going to the Centre. FOOD CO-OP A big thank you to Diana Barlow who volunteers many hours each week packaging up all our bulk goods- we only have a handful of volunteers for the Co-op at the moment but she is worth 10! However we are getting busier and busier and even Diana won’t be able to keep up with the demand- so come along for an hour a two a month- earn a discount on your food and be part of a Co-op that has been going 20 years next year! “SWEET” TRAINING NIGHT FOR VOLUNTEERS NEW AND OLD: 18th March – 6:30 Volunteers are fantastic people and the Environment Centre is a fantastic place to volunteer! We’ve had volunteer workers supporting us here for years now and without their help, we couldn’t survive! Working in the Centre is a great way to make friends and to meet with travellers on their way around the country – the people who have an interest in good, healthy food and the many other things we have at the Centre. It doesn’t take long to learn the ins and outs here and the other volunteers and staff at the centre make it fun to do. If you have any spare time and a desire to meet new and interesting people, spending a couple of hours a month volunteering at the South Coast Environment Centre might be just the thing for you. Call in and meet us or telephone 2348717 for a chat or come along to our next volunteers evening where we have a ‘pot luck’ desert and learn about recording sales on with our new computer system. ORCHARD PROJECT. We were so overwhelmed by the number of old fruit trees and orchards, we could only graft a third of them last year, concentrating on the endangered ones first with good success rates. We then got some more root stocks and tried to graft the rest late in the season. These later graftings were less successful. This year we will visit and mark the trees best for saving - our aim of saving every tree now seems a bit unrealistic as many orchards have more than 30 trees. So ‘the best of Southlands apples’ is our new aim not every single tree, just because it is old! The 2009 ‘bulk buy’ fruit tree catalogue will be on our website and at the Centre in mid April. The Otautau Arboretum committee is hoping to establish 30 of Southland’s best heritage apple trees on their reserve this year. What we hope is the first of many similar projects in reserves all around Southland. YOU CAN PART OWN A GRAIN MILL We have a lovely little electric grain mill available for families to buy a share in - it is based in the centre. For $50 you can be a share holder and use it to grind up to 5 kg a week for use at home and enjoy the most nutritious flour possible; ground with a special hard artificial stone. It grinds corn, wheat, barley etc. and you can adjust the fineness of the flour. RIVERTON ORGANIC GROWERS GROUP This year the Riverton Organic Group has been going 20 years! In November 1989 the Guyton’s bravely organised the National Soil and Health Association President Perry Spiller, to speak in Riverton. Lo and behold 57 people turned up, double that of the similar event in Invercargill the night before. Those like-minded people decided, as a result of the meeting, to form an Organic Group. The older became the mentors of the younger and this group was the seed of the whole environmental development in Riverton. How can we commemorate this significant start? Last month we enjoyed a visit to Peter and Marijke Aalders 2 acre self sufficient property in Otahuti- luckily a window of fine weather opened for us amongst our very patchy summer. Next month as well as a short garden visit, we will be planning the next 6 months of our programme so do come along and let us know what you would like to do and learn this year. TRADE AID You may have heard that Invercargill’s Trade Aid shop has, sadly, closed. We stock a good variety of their products, mainly organic teas, coffees and chocolate. Please let us know if you would like us to stock any other eco friendly items so we can support fair trade. DID YOU KNOW? The Centre sells… vege seedlings, native trees, berry bushes, herbs, pre European seed-potatoes, certified organic plant mixes, Bokashi kits, Niwashi garden tools, Kings and Koanga seeds, bird nesting boxes and feeding tables, a range of books and magazines, eco-friendly cleaning products, moon calendars and a huge range of organic food......? If it is part of being eco-friendly and self reliant, we have it or can get it if requested. Call into our centre- we stock only the best! EVENTS March 2009 Friday 6th Organic Farmers Market 3pm to 5pm Tuesday 10th SCES Monthly meeting All welcome Friday 13th Organic Farmers Market 3pm to 5pm Monday 16th Heritage Harvest Festival Planning night 7pm Coming along and find out how you can help in a small way to make this a great event. Wednesday 18th Volunteers night 6.30-7 start. Pot luck dessert Thursday 19th Teacher Training Day make sure your school know about this great opportunity to learn all about school gardening. A repeat of the very successful workshop we hosted and tutored last year. Friday 20th Organic Farmers Market 3pm to 5pm Tuesday 24th Organic Garden Group meeting & visits- 'Walking bus' from Centre, meet at 7pm, heritage tomato varieties and raised beds, followed by planning meeting at Centre on autumn/winter programme of speakers and events. Tell us what you would like! ALL WELCOME Friday 27th Organic Farmers Market 3pm to 5pm Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th Heritage Harvest Festival two days of workshops, displays, activities. Ph fax 03 2348717 or email info@sces.org.nz for further details |